Top 100 Albums of the 2000s

The Avalanches' 2000 debut announced the decade anew: slaying the irony that reigned over the '90s and championing the glories of sincerity. Hearing the sad melancholy inherent in every lost or forgotten record they cut from, the Melburnian crew cobbled together a tapestry of romanticized samples. The result, Since I Left You, explores that hoakiest record-spinning concept —the DJ taking you on a journey— in earnest. Like any good road movie, it's voyage not into the landscape, but the interior; an album powered by flights of imagination. It proved so good that The Avalanches made it their only record of the '00s; the undelivered, perhaps-never-coming status of its follow-up turning this into some sort of Australian Loveless.

When Brummie outfit Broadcast blithely arrived in a sea of modular organs, rickety drums, and cooing vocals, they were summarily as a second-rate Stereolab. Thankfully, they didn't let it dissuade them, and, by the time they finally arrived at their debut album —after five years of existence— they were already an utterly unique proposition. The brilliant The Noise Made By People finds Broadcast coaxing all kinds of otherworldly —or, more aptly, worldly— sounds out of keyboards; the eerie “Echo's Answer” making synths sound like wind howling through high-cliffs on some snow-swept outpost. Broadcast went on to make two more killer records in the '00s —2003's Haha Sound and 2005's Tender Buttons— but neither quite summoned the same magic.

Baltimore's amazing Celebration have been dubbed “the greatest band in the world” by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek. Who happened to, y'know, produce both Celebration LPs in the '00s. But he speaks the truth: Celebration's second set, The Modern Tribe is utterly thrilling, wickedly soulful, and strangely underloved. The stripped-down trio make the scant sound mighty: David Bergander's nimble-limb'd percussion all tumbling-over, propulsive momentum; Sean Antanaitis' fevered organ stabs eerily delirious; Katrina Ford's untamed caterwauling pirouetting in an around these insistent rhythms. It's dance music for the out-of-step; a party lighting up the shadows; a celebration of living through dark times. It is, indeed, undoubtably great.

Raised on remote Fidalgo Island near the Canadian border, Phil Elverum grew up in the shadows of Mt. Erie's towering 1200 feet. To him, it was Mount Eerie, a looming, terrifying peak that served as a constant reminder of man's inconsequential stature in the face of nature. Elverum's Mount Eerie is an indie-rock opera about this; sending its protagonist on an Odyssey up the mythical mountain, he comes face to face with the environment manifest: the earth, the sun, and the universe all manifest as living beings. Musically, Elverum stages this as five long sections, built on Taiko drumming, distorted bass, and washed out choruses, and overlaid with wilderness sounds —whale-calls, snowfalls, wind and rain— as reminder of the immensity of nature.

Silver Mt. Zion —who record under an ever-changing handle that, at its longest, has read Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band with Choir— is the side-project of Godspeed You! Black Emperor leader Efrim Menuck, born out of a desire to sing. By their fourth LP, Efrim and his SMZ crew were belting it out. Horses in the Sky features plenty of plaintive caterwauling, communal choruses lamenting the fate of the human carbine in throaty, hearty, sobbing wails. Menuck's crowning symphony-of-decay —perhaps his best ever album— touches on familiar themes —love, love of animals, dead pets, the military-industrial complex, gentrification, community, mercy, hope— as it touches some sort of God in the space b'tween its (many) members.

Daniel Bejar’s Dylan-esque discography is a maze of mirrors; the lithe lyricist authoring an ever-evolving, proper-name-fetishising songworld in which lyrical references draw webs of connections between tracks from all over his back-catalogue; creating worlds upon songworlds in which his words start to take on talismanic power. His career-defining seventh album, Destroyer’s Rubies, marked the culmination of Bejar’s obsessive craft. Here, he hammers his familiar hallmarks —literary lyrical texts, over-the-top anthemicism, hysterical Bowie-esque falsetto-ing, camp piano, searing guitar solos— into the most instantly impressive, infinitely replayable set of stirring, sterling pop-songs in Destroyer's tangled-up canon.

Dear Companion may seem a slight prospect: a solo debut for one of the ladies of Philadelphian acid-folk outfit Espers, recorded in less than 24 hours by one of her bandmates, made up mostly of folk standards and odd covers. Yet, one listen to Baird's rendition of “Willie O'Winsbury,” wrung out to six beauteous minutes, shows this album's sense of magic; Baird breathing life anew into this ancient traditional by the spell of her quivering singing. Performing with a purity reminiscent of folk-revival heroine Anne Briggs (especially re: her 1971 classic, The Time Has Come), Baird's fingerpick’d guitar and honeycomb voice are of such uncontrived, near naïve beauty that her songs seem like vessels of naked, unguarded truth.

The best American singer-songwriter of the '00s wasn't Conor Oberst or Bruce Springsteen or any other dude playing stadiums, but an obscure, publicity-averse, touring-reticent songstress who spent years burning her own CDR albums and taking them around to Brooklyn record-stores. Diane Cluck came up through New York's anti-folk scene, perfecting her lyrically-dexterous, emotionally-overwhelming songs on works of home-recorded wonder. By the time she released her first-ever properly-pressed-up LP in 2003, Cluck was at the peak of her game. Oh Vanille/Ova Nil finds her wielding her sharpened songsmith's pen with aplomb; her use of language so intense and evocative that she redefines what one person singing over acoustic guitar is capable of.

Back in 2000, there was nothing Cat Power couldn't do. Hot on the heels of her cult-defining classic Moon Pix, Chan Marshall proved her powers by breathing life into the moribund concept of the covers record. Most bow down before the rock'n'roll songbook, but Marshall's happily subverts the mythologies normally writ into cover versions. Though she's dabbling in the pantheon —the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan— Marshall is utterly unreverent; stripping songs of their rock'n'roll bluster —their own essential identities— and authoring them anew as eerie Cat Power laments that bear little resemblance to their source works. It's a work of artistic transubstantiation, turning tired standards into nascent tunes of pure rapture.